About the NEO Personality Inventory (NEO-PI)
By the mid-1980s, factor-analytic personality research had converged on a five-factor structure (work by Lewis Goldberg, Robert McCrae, Paul Costa, and others). What was needed was a clinically-usable assessment instrument operationalizing this structure. Paul Costa and Robert McCrae at the National Institute on Aging spent the early 1980s developing such an instrument; the result was the NEO Personality Inventory (NEO-PI), published in 1985.
The 1985 NEO-PI initially measured only three of the Big Five factors: Neuroticism, Extraversion, and Openness to experience (hence 'NEO'). The 1992 NEO-PI-R revision added the remaining two factors (Conscientiousness and Agreeableness) and refined the scoring; the 2010 NEO-PI-3 has updated norms.
Each NEO-PI scale has six 'facet' subscales (so each Big Five domain has six narrower subdimensions, totaling 30 facets). This makes the NEO-PI substantially more detailed than briefer Big Five measures like the BFI-10 or BFI-2. The NEO-PI is the most-used research instrument in personality psychology and is widely used in clinical assessment for personality disorders, career counseling, and treatment planning.
The 5 subtests
Source
All test materials and historical content on this page are transcribed from:
NEO-PI, NEO-PI-R, and NEO-PI-3 items are under PAR (Psychological Assessment Resources) copyright. We document the instrument's history.
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